I take the fire escape stairs up to my room. I hear Pete and Calliope still dealing with confused commotions downstairs. I hear them yelling about settling down and getting into lines and something about gate numbers.

    “We’ll figure it out,” I say as I place the bird cage on my desk.

  The ceiling fan spins in mute and airy interruptions. I take off my black coat but I don’t bother with the medical gloves here. No one else uses this room. No one has the key. Though, I'd suppose a spook might be able to figure out a way in. Spooks are sneaky and troublesome like that. But it's been a while since a spook's been through St. Michael's. So, we won't worry about crossing paths with spooks for now. 

  The contents spill over the desk. I lift up her shirt and her jeans. Or what's left of them. They're hanging together in frayed pieces and I accidentally tear off one of the sleeves entirely. They’re splotched with blood but the stains are dry and dirty brown now, gluing the fabrics to each other.

  I go through the contents of her pockets and sort the shreds of shrivelled skin to bag separately. I find a snapped necklace and slender golden rings. I find a tooth. I find a tangled cord, presumably the remainders of earphones. I pick at the matted strands of hair and bits of nails under the lamp light - a circumference of brightness over my bare arms. I wonder if any of this is going to be useful or if I'm just holding on to sorrow. Is it sorrow, really?

  Metamorphosis was quick but she survived it. Her body followed the dream-speed of the mind. Presumably, she became. I look up and meet the bird’s gaze in the dimness. A spot of wet swims and lights up its eye. It opens and closes its sandy-coloured beak. It watches me as I get up and I pace around the room.

  It can’t be that Sunny is still there. Her consciousness. I can’t be that it’s just Sunny, at least. I wonder if this is the collapse. If she concentrated so much of herself into an ideal, she became its essence. An embodied fantasy. It doesn’t flinch when I approach it. It - I decide to call it until I’m sure. There’s an intelligence in its tan feathery form. A comfortable fluidity. But also something foreign and ungraspable. Maybe I’m lucky it’s in a cage. Maybe it’s trying to sniff out my fear. Maybe it’s sizing me up.

  I won’t know until I see the boy for comparison. What I do know is there’s no cure for it. Surely, you can’t go back from a singularity. If it’s boiled down to the primordial it must be like inescapable gravity. Much like a black hole. The realization doesn’t stun me but I push the window open. Nothing but stale heat. Nothing but perfect darkness, going on and on and on.

  If Sunny’s merged with the singularity, I can’t tell them apart. I lay down and listen to the crowd trickle and disperse to the bus boarding area outside. Three busses wait with windows glowing pale blue in the night. I listen to the clinking of glasses and the stacking of plates. The little squeaks of the flimsy wooden walls. 

  Bird feet patter around in the cage.

  I leave the room before sunrise because I can’t take the incertitude anymore. I can’t take those twinkling eyes on me as it twists and turns its head to monitor me. Careful and silent. It’s waiting for something and I feel it in my gut. The quiet’s too quiet. An eerie precursor to violence. The predatory and unexpected kind. Inhuman and almost cruel.

  I decide to leave it behind, safely locked in the room. Couldn't risk it have a strange reaction near the boy. After all, most of what I know about these cases comes from books. I'd only seen a few very mild cases years and years ago. Though, there've been plagues of it - the singularity running amok. But it's much before my time. What's different now is its choice of spirit hosts. 

  The town’s changed. 

  The air smells like rain on an early autumn morning. I notice it as soon as I step out and it fills me with anger and dread. I stop, half turned away from the door. Keys dangle coldly from my fingers. The town delved deep into my mind and plucked some other memory to use against me and it grew another layer of invasive skin. I see my breath rise and curl under the tremors of ghostly light above my door. 

  It would have changed sooner or later. It was just waiting for the right moment to spring a surprise on me. St. Michael's likes to make you forget it's an extension of the city.  

  Even my door’s changed. From the washed out green to a finely carved black one with a golden handle. I unlock it and peer inside. The furniture’s a murky polished brown and it smells like my childhood home. The endearing smell of cherry wood, the lingering aroma of drying wheat, freshly squeezes grapes. I see my faceless reflection in the lacquered side of the wardrobe.

  It’s dark but I can see the outlines of towering ample-trunked oak trees hiding the streets with their broad leafy crowns. I see them clustered around the gas station and the parking lot. The stairs aren’t rusty metal anymore but solid damp blocks of cedar. The desert’s gone and I step onto thick dewy grass.

  The chill of premonition.

    “Here it goes, here it goes,” sing the fucking harpies.